In the past the direction in the tree felling art has been towards more and more complicated and enormous devices which of course have become quite expensive. The general scheme has been to use one or more pincer-like claws which simultaneously cut and hold a tree to be harvested both before and after cutting. Many of these massive devices are capable of cutting while holding several cut trees vertically. Representative of such devices are U.S. Pat. No. 4,050,488 issued to Albright on Sept. 27, 1977; U.S. Pat. No. 3,468,352 issued to Larson et al. on Sept. 23, 1969; U.S. Pat. No. 3,805,860 issued to Smith on Apr. 23, 1974; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,886,985 issued to Iarocci et al. on June 3, 1975.
Devices which cut trees one at a time and store them in a nonvertical configuration are also known. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,665,985 issued to White on May 30, 1972 describes a tree harvesting apparatus with a grappling front feeding shear which shears a grabbed tree and then wrestles it to a horizontal position alongside the vehicle. It is also known to store the cut trees atop the harvesting vehicle. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,528,468 issued Blonsky on Sept. 15, 1970 discloses a front feeding shear which shears a tree and then lifts and rotates it onto an overhead rack attached to the vehicle where the tree is stored in a horizontal configuration. It is also possible, according to Blonsky, to shear the trees and to allow them to fall by gravity onto the overhead rack. Another device with "on the vehicle" collection is described in an article entitled "Plantation Machine Expanding Horizons," by Richard W. Bryan in Forest Industries Magazine, September 1970. The article shows a harvesting machine which grabs and shears a tree with a grapple and a front feeding shear and then lifts and rotates it to a horizontal position on top of the vehicle where it is stored in a U-shaped trough. A holding arm rotates over the cut tree to hold it in position.
The deficiency common to these prior efforts is that they are relatively complex and therefore relatively expensive. It has long been a desire of those in the field of plantation harvesting especially in areas such as the Southern United States where the trees being harvested, such as pine trees, are generally less than 40 centimeters in diameter, to have a simple, economical feller-buncher which is easily adapted to vehicles commonly in use in tree harvesting operations.